Mending Nets

It's been a strange few days. First a week of British weather, during which I suffered a debilitating and sometimes agonising inner-ear infection, characterised by alternating feelings of in-skull pressure and then white-hot shooting pains in the eustachian tube. In despair I visited the doc, and she said... cut out coffee, drink truckloads of water, and you'll be right in a couple of days. Depressingly, she was spot-on, and after a simple rehydration regimen, I felt great. How can I be so deaf to my body's signals, that I drink so much less fluid than I need that I leave myself in severe pain?
The weather then turned on a sixpence, and for the last five days, we've had the most glorious winter days, bright, calm, blue and perfect - this couldn't have come at better time, both for the pathetic falacy of my sudden freedom from ear-pain, and to coincide with my being at home five days a week.
Unfortunately this week has been a busy week of early morning meetings and teleconferences with the rest of my team in Denver, and the final frantic "going permie" negotiations with work (yep, I'm officially a wage-slave again from Monday - the only consolation being that I'm at my desk just 2 days a week) all this meant Monday-to-Friday chaos, and the weekend has been no better: Anne, the Souh African ultra-runner we've been cat-sitting for, decided that driving down to Surfers Paradise to take part in a 42k road race immediately after flying back from competing in South Africa's 90k Comrades ultra-marathon wasn't the wisest thing to do, so she changed her plans and asked us to vacate her place on Friday so she could sleep for 72 hours.
This worked out fairly well, as it meant we had the weekend to get ourselves settled in to our nice little room in West End - our abode for the next ten weeks or so. We got all our stuff unpacked, sorted out a little desk and a few other things we'll need to get by - as I'm working from home 3 days a week, the place is both our room and my home office until September! Our housemates have interesting CDs to rip, and interesting books to read... And it's fantastic to not be in a cultural desert like Spring Hill or Toowong - from our new place, it's a two minute walk to the venue where Concord Dawn are playing in two weeks' time, and a cornucopia of random and alternative weirdness... We're right at home.
Today we took advantage of the glorious winter weather to head West to Ipswich (as our final "we're checking out West of Brissie" destination) - no offense to the place and its redneck populace, but it's almost an archetypal nothing town - the most interesting thing we could find to pass the time was to wander along the riverbanks under the town's newish bridges, and read the bronze plaques explaining how the older bridges had been washed away in the massive flood of 1974. Another three or four metres of floodwater, an you'd wash the rest of the place into Moreton Bay too.